Archer was amazing then you jump into arguably what could be described as one of the most difficult businesses to get into why' you start figure the humanoid robot is like the ultimate deployment Vector for AGI it is truly my honor and pleasure to introduce to you Brett Adcock founder and CEO of figure you went from a a cold start in 31 months to shipping your first robot we are designing a new hardware platform every 12 to 18 months like by by the time I file the C Corp we had the robot walking in Under 12 months I think you're going to see it in the coming years being put into homes just through speech be able to do like very long Horizon hours of work without any problems there's like an iPhone moment happening with humanoids like it's going to be this is going to happen right now now that's a moonshot ladies and gentlemen I think most of you know that the news media is delivering negative news to us all the time because we PID 10 times more attention to negative news than positive news for me the only news worthwhile that's true and impacting humanity is the news of Science and Technology that's what I pay attention to and every week I put out two blogs one on AI and exponential Tech and one on Longevity if this is of interest to you and it's available totally for free please join me subscribe at Dam andis.com subscribe that's DM andis.com subscribe all right let's go back to the episode thank you for being here yeah thanks for having me I know with three young kids and a robot Factory in production and incredible team of Engineers you're really busy and I don't take it for granted that you you joined us here yeah my only request is next time I want a figure robot with you loud and clear I I I I begged him um and uh BMW's been taking the Lion Share of them yep we we do have a lot we actually have them running every every day now so like they're there today running and uh in their largest plant why'd you start figure I mean you had this incredible a few incredible successes uh and Archer was amazing and then you jump into arguably what could be described as one of the most difficult businesses to get into yeah I think um we really need to figure out a way to give like AGI a body here um I think it's like a really negative or like almost like dystopian future if we figure out how to solve AGI and it lives in a server somewhere and it's like you know more intelligent than the than all of human like like everybody and ultimately if it wants to do something in the physical world It'll ask it'll have to ask or BOS human to do it and um the humanoid robot is like the ultimate deployment Vector for AGI it's um you can't solve this with anything else besides a human like a mechanical human you need um you need something that is a single platform that with no Hardware changes can do everything a human can and you need something that can also be good for the neural Nets like the neural net here in a humanoid can basically learn like basically learn from transfer learning um it can basically multitask across a variety of different uh applications which is like really good for a neural net so we basically can build like one single neural net like Foundation model that can empow the whole robot to do everything end to end um I mean you know massive congrats you went from a a cold start in 31 months to shipping your first robot uh which is which is extraordinary I mean a lot of companies get their PowerPoint decks ready and raise their first capital in that period of time and uh we're going to be seeing some of the robots in back here uh when I visited you up north you know you showed me around um we did a podcast together and you showed me figure one and here's figure two and here's the designs of figure three uh one of the things I truly find amazing is the speed of your iteration can you speak to that and how important rapid iteration in Hardware is because Hardware is hard yeah this is a hard problem we have to figure out how to do something that's never been done before uh and it's like a very complex system like definitely more complex from an engineering perspective than Archer was like building an air electric aircraft um so yeah my rule of thumb is like the first or second generation Hardware is always going to suck you know like the first iPhone was not great like the first first time you make something like you're never going to get it right in Hardware you have to do that like um you have to see like five years in the future you have to know exactly what the product does and then you have to clean sheet design it for that exact thing day one and if you mess up any of those you can't go back and fix it through the design process you have like long lead time supply chain everything else so we are designing a new hardware platform every 12 to 18 months um by the way that's pretty amazing just to hear that right every 12 to 18 months a brand new iteration I mean yeah we had a figure one walking like by by the time I file filed the C Corp we had the robot walking in Under 12 months another thing you've done is youve completely vertically integrated yeah that was that a necessity like there was there's no supply chain for humanoid robots like there's no like motor vendors actor vendor sensors Battery Systems structures like kinematics like all the software which is like pretty vast it's like firmware embedded systems operating systems middleware controls AI so walk me through your fa your factory you walk me through it before but like what are the different segments of what's going on there yeah in terms of like design for how yeah I mean you've got you've got component building testing integration all those things so we um so we clean clean sheet design everything from basically the ground up uh like all the hardware is like clean sheet design we look at like ultimately what does the product need to do the product needs to um you you basically want to talk to a robot and you want it to just do things without any human intervention you just wanted to go out and do stuff in the world um so we're designing for a capable robot that can go out and do everything from putting robots in a home to walk your dog make coffee um do the laundry and then the commercial Workforce which is like roughly half of GDP is human labor so it's like the largest market in the world yeah 1101 1220 trillion dollars the global GDP your Tam is like 5050 to 60 trillion that's pretty good yeah it's like it's going to it's going to build the biggest business in the world by a long shot like this in In Our Lifetime like the this the space uh yeah so we have basically we um so we're looking at like the in markets where the robot needs to go we do all the hardware design which is like kinematic design joints Motors uh Battery Systems sensors um we do all the software firmware embedded systems controls all the AI work end to end um and then we do all the testing and Manufacturing and integration and Fleet operations and deliver those to the CL so we have robots now we have two commercial customers um the first was BMW we have robots there that are operating every single day um they're in spart andberg South Carolina they're helping to build cars uh we got some video I think from the from the uh BMW plant if we can roll in background or repeat that video yeah we'll show that and we have a second customer we just signed and then within 30 days of like starting the work we we were doing the work all end to end with neural Nets and um this is like one of the largest Logistics compan companies in the world and then we're um we're also pushing really hard on the home so um yeah here's a quick update for uh for BMW um so we have just robots here um that are basically doing like basically putting sheet metal on fixtures um this is a job that every major Manufacturing Company in the world does our robots have doing that fully autonomously at at the speeds we need to basically um hit high performance um with no human intervention no faults no failures and no drug testing no days no no days off no days off no days off yeah 247 totally I mean it's a it's a interesting thing right think about this um let me jump into one thing in volume in the future I believe I heard you say you'll see these at a price point of 20 to $30,000 you still hold that yeah we like done a lot of work on the build materials like if you start breaking this down like to the bare like you kind of just basically look at it line item by line item of what it really looks like and what basically what it looks like in like high High rate manufacturing there's really nothing in the system right now that would show that this product should be very like extremely like expensive the calculation I do is if I if I was going to lease a $30,000 car it's about 300 bucks a month which is by the way $10 a day and 40 cents an hour so here's my question how many of these humanoid robots would you own at 300 bucks a month operating 247 no complaints no fights with the girlfriends or boyfriends I mean the number could well be multiple per human yeah you're going to want one they're going to see like I woke up like I wake up every morning and help unload the dishwasher and pick up kids toys like I never want to do any of that ever again like I you know it's just like not like something I need to be doing when I get home or I'm I'm at the house uh we really haven't had a lot of innovation in the home for like almost 50 70 years we like same appliances same stuff like we need old we had old robots we called them dishwashers now they just like been around for a long time yeah and US humans are having to like work with it right like we have to work with that machine every day and it's just like not something you'll do anymore in the future you'll just like talk to the robot and have it do it it'll be on a schedule any moment you can just call it text it talk to it and it's asking to do stuff and it'll just go do it it'll know you better than it'll know you just like yourself I remember a couple years ago I'm very proud uh bold is an early investor in uh in figure and I I brought tort to to meet you and I said listen the thing first of all uh Brett's an incredible operator multiple successes what's one of the best predictors of the future it's what a person's done in their past right it is very much one of the best predictors uh but what I found amazing uh that sold me instantly beyond your charm uh is the team you pull together can you talk about that because it's I think a lot of people in the audience here are focused on their Moon shots this very much is a moonshot yeah um you you exit Archer how did you capitalize what did you start how do you pull your team together you describe that early moment yeah like um so you know I haven't founded a lot of companies in my lifetime I get to like go back every time and like what did I mess up on what did I get right try to make things better um fundamentally the things that I spend a lot of my time is just like building basically in order to build like one of the world's greatest products you need like the like one of the world's greatest teams and then you need um you need to align that team with like what the shared vision is and everybody needs to be accountable for that and understand it and then you got to figure out how to hit the gas pedal like really hard so the entire culture at figure even an Archer When I built um initial team was um was like very deliberate and even at figure if you go to the website now we have like the culture deck we have the master plan we have like things laid out that are like really unique we're in silen value but almost like the anti-s and value you have to work every day in the office we work five to seven days a week we work really hard um and not a lot of people want to do that and that's fine it's just not the right people for us um we've assembled now a couple like hundreds of like the best engineers and AI robotics in the world there's just like no nobody even close to what we've done um seriously like incredible yeah like it's unbelievable like my whole business team has been with me at a veret Archer now figure they're just I mean we've spent 15 years years together there's unbelievable operators they give me the ability to like spend basically all my time on product engineering uh to basically build the best product possible and they help scale the business which is great um hiring just uh recruiting HR like uh legal just Finance across the board uh they're great so yeah the team's insane uh but what's even better is like the culture is just absolutely like dialed in like everybody knows what they should be doing uh I don't do 101s things like that um we have like a shared Vision what to do and we work really hard to go get there and the dopamine that we all get is the same like we um we want to ship product that's what we're aligned to like that's what everybody like basically yeah gets their dopamine which is really great so it's like this shared uh fuel that we have to ship product and this is such a hard thing like this humanoid stuff is like it's like a maybe one of the most complex things I could have worked on and um you just you have to have that fundamentally or there's literally zero shot this is gonna work you know we're going to hear from Travis clanic tomorrow who's going to say very much the same thing that your your what we call your massive transformative purpose that that clear Mission Vision and then aligning your team and culture around that when it starts with you so you made a commitment of your own Capital to get it going and then you start calling people at other companies and uh what was your pitch to raise capital what's that to raise capital or recruit no no no to to get those employees on board oh um the pitch in 2022 was I'm going to fund this whole thing for many years um you know we we and it was expensive like we got to a million a month of burn in six months so it wasn't like uh but I was like full pedal of the metal from day one I just like knew exactly what to do I mean Archer is kind of like a flying robot in a lot of ways um so I I I knew how to build teams I know how to like we knew the product what to do I knew the technical understanding of like the power train and control systems and beta software and sensors um so it's was like you know we just like went really quickly out of there the pitch was like Hey I'm going to fund it so there's like no funding risk at least in the near- term like next couple years uh there's a good chance for us to build like the next I like an iPhone moment happening with humanoids like it's going to be this is going to happen right now and what did you tell them the probability of success was uh pretty low like uh the thing the thing that we had to do was like we had to do we we needed to prove like three things that have never been done before that you had to go get all three of those right in the next like sub like you know sub five years or you fail for sure you have to build like incredible hardware for humanoids that's like extremely complex it can never fail it's always got to work and it's got to work at human speeds with human range of motion nobody's ever done that before like most robots that walk around can't even walk right like they fall over the time it's very complex like maybe like rocket turbo fan level complexity in terms of hardware systems um the second is you need to be a this is a neural net problem not a control problem you can't write code your way out of this you can't hire PhD with a robot and solve every problem you have to basically ingest like uh human-like data in the robot through a neural net and it's got to be able to then imitate what the humans do so you have to solve that which has never been solved on a humanoid system of like um you know it's like a high dimensionality system not like a robot arm on a table which most of none of those have ai and then the third thing you have to do is you have to figure out how to generalize you have to do something that's a holy grail of Robotics you have to figure out how to look at something you've never seen before through speech tell robot how to do it and then be able to execute that task fully into to end just with one neurl net so the the the you know and I wrote about this in the master plan in 2022 it's like we need to solve those if you can solve those you're in the right decade you're going to go build the iPhone moment for this whole space and we're in full lift off but like but those looked pretty dire at the time in 2022 there was just nothing out there I mean you had boss dynamics that was like leaping around and doing back flips and parkour and stuff but like nowhere near the level of like manipulation and dexterity you needed for humanoid robots to enter the home so so um I think we can confidently say now we've like we have solved or we're making substantial progress on all of those amazing so which is great so like I think like [Music] yes there was a pivotal moment uh late last year where you said open aai was a large investor and you were baselining open ai's AI systems and you made a critical decision say nope we have to build our own AI internally uh Helix uh can you speak to that moment and I'd like to show the video of figure at home along that lines yeah that'd be great um okay so what you're seeing is Helix this is our like um this is our like a large scale AI internally um it's like a basically a large scale like Vision language action model and this is public it's on our YouTube um so the prompt here that Cory gave he leads the Helix team was um putting groceries on the table and the prompt was just put the groceries away not telling you where they go not telling you what they are just put them away and the trick here like the the the the tricky part for the robots they never have seen any of the groceries before in training we purposely withheld all of these items so it's like the first time the robot has ever seen these in its life with its own cameras and sensors and so you basically have to solve like the generalization problem in a home every home is different like you know we all have different like toaster ovens we have different appliances we have different like spatulas and silverware like every and it's located differently and things are changing throughout the day so you really have to solve this like I call like semantic intelligence but like it's like a semantic grounding that's needed from a human world to robot world and um Helix um we can talk about why I was able to do that um is able to communicate on a single neural net on each robot and collectively together able to put these all away um with just a single English PL and um so I think this this is like the first signs of life I I think I will go even like more maybe a boulder claim I think this this is probably the most important AI update for robotics in human history everything in the future that moves will be a robot and it will be powered by AI agents like this um this was trained on also very little data like 500 hours of data trained in this I love the way they're like looking at each other to confirm like yes I get it like oh where are you putting that thing yeah I think that's a good a good idea to put it up there yeah actually it's uman is is that is that a created uh you know like they're about to look at each other here as he passes it over like I get listen a part of this was like uh that's funny uh part of this was like U emerging from training so when the robots are doing handovers they actually look at each other there's actually a very Split Second where like one robot needs to release the package of the item other robot needs to grab it so it doesn't lose like basically like hold of the item and fall down so what happened emerging from training is the robots actually look at each other as the clearing clearing way signal for like we should be releasing the item into each other's hands U which was like really interesting uh the other stuff of like robots looking at each other and moving around like um I think it's just overall important there's like a certain level of communication that needs to happen from a robot in terms of like uh interaction design with humans so you don't want like you know you don't want to walk in a room and have a robot just like not move and like not look at you like humans look and like do nods and gestures like all of this is extremely important to learn like we need to learn these expressions of humans uh just like we need to learn how to grab items um it's going to be super important as we at scale integrate robots into the entire world that this happens I have a thousand questions for you let me hit a few rapid style here okay yeah let's do it so figure three when do I get to see I saw the designs when does figure three get shown yeah you keep asking this you like this one you saw it it was a it was a I mean you know degree of beauty was increasing yeah I don't think people understand this how like incredible well they don't cuz we haven't showed it but we um so we like we're on this is like the ones robots you saw here on the videos on stage where figure two it's our second generation robot um you can like kind of I guess figure one's like online a little bit but it's like it's a little bit more gnarly It's like got wires outside of it and it's a little bit more fast and it was a much more um quicker design cycle to get this to our Engineers to start doing real use case work um the figure two was like a feature complete robot that was supposed to be is able to do almost anything a human or vast majority of it um you know we haven't talked about this publicly a lot but we we're done now with figure 3 design um I think we'll we'll probably show an update next week just a quick minor like a minor update not not not anything material um as it relates to how like what we're going about for uh that process um figure three is like you look at like figure one to figure two and it's like a huge step up you're like wow this look from a college DM room project to a real like like pretty decent robot and like the magnitude of the stepup was pretty material that same magnitude happened again on figure three so if you were to see it it's just unbelievable we spent like 18 months designing it from scratch uh the high level it's just like 90% cheaper uh it's smaller it's less Mass um it's got better sensors it's hands head and feet were designed for neural Nets it's a completely uh I would say like you know figure 2 is probably the best humanoid on the market maybe you know probably not by a ton but like I think it's the best 10% 20% figure three is just like next level design like we've spent um it's definitely like the most like for me like the most proud moment I've had in Engineering in my career like looking at that robot and so uh we're going into production uh manufacturing with that this year we'll have some more updates on that in soon um that's the robot that we want to send everywhere into the world uh we want to make it a low cost very high rate um it's even better just on like so many dimensions um like me about production rates over the next three four years and when I'm going to see it in the home yeah so we have like two tracks we have this like Workforce track which is like um and then we have the home track like the what what most people don't get is like the workforce is the big business like it's half of GDP we can charge meaningfully more per robot than the house um and it's also easier the the the things that the robot does is just like the same things on almost on a repeat uh the home is like the Wild West it's like extremely hard uh we have a huge safety area of like not falling on like any human or hurting people there's a semantic in safety of like not knocking over the candle and burning the house down there's like the home is just like vastly harder like um maybe in self-driving it's like driving on the highway is like Workforce for us and driving into the city is like the home it's just like unbelievably difficult um between our two first commercial customers which are very large businesses uh we have demand like if we had 100,000 robots today that all worked they would take 100,000 robots today and so and and then we have like 50 customers I could sign by the weekend that are all Fortune 100 companies that we've like literally visited we know them we just like we can't I've you know done a bunch of meetings today at lunch everybody's like what do you think about helping out here in healthcare constru all sound great like we're just like bombarded with the amount of demand here you're thinking about like the workforce you have like a certain certain number of supply of humans it's literally going down demographically baby roomers are retiring so you have less humans in the workforce there's labor pains everywhere and you know like there's a lot of job shortages like we can so anyway we see like just unbounded demand I I think we could ship a million robots to this month if we like had them all working in their ready to go and I think one thing that we're going to maybe add before you go sorry I know you want to Rocket fire but um you guys saw BMW and you saw our second commercial customer it took us a year to do BMW fully end to end at high like high speeds like last summer if you look at figure one it was four minutes now we got down like 40 seconds and just a lot of great engineering work into it we started working on Helix it was just completely transformative like completely and then we said okay well what if we use Helix for this next use case for the new second customer and we did that whole thing in to in in under 30 days from scratch had nothing and I think if we had to do it all over again we could maybe do it in less than 48 hours and so the robots are going to learn how to do something in like the matter of hours here not like 10 years from now like this year and I think that has pushed our timeline left multiple years for the home like the the the hardest thing like the long poll in the T for the home is like is like um semantic intelligence like can understand what the hell is going on anywhere it goes so um under over on the home is what we'll start Alpha Testing in the home this year which means like our we'll be doing internal work on the home like my home or like like Engineers homes you want to get rid of that dishwashing doity dude I can't do it anymore just like what am I doing uh it's just like not something I want to do like I want to spend time with the family and kids and wife you know it's like just no bueno so yeah we got to fix that um I feel I mean at this point we just feel datab Bound in the home like we think if we just like increase the data set that we trained Helix with by like a couple orders of magnitude it would probably like right now Helix we put in like a we put a little note on the website about Helix and one of the things we put in is you just drop like small household objects in front of it it can pick pick up almost every object we put in front of it like we put up this like weird Cactus like toy like from one of the kids rooms and it was like scene and we're like pick up the desert item and it's got of like it's got to relate like a cactus to a desert like you know plant and it was a toy and it was singing it was moving and it picked it up so like all of that is like in the weights and it has like a very large like LM backbone to it so it really understands the world semantic grounding so we think just like we just need more data now like basically data Bound for it so I guess there's a lot of confidence that um you're seeing a sign of life now that you haven't seen in history that a robot intelligent robot in the in the world can be built and the question is we just got to keep extrapolating that on like the curve far enough to where it's entering and I think it's like this decade I think you're going to see it in the coming years being put into homes just through speech be able to do like very long Horizon hours of work without any prompt with any fix everybody thanks for listening to moonshots you know this is the content I love sharing with the world every week I put out two blogs a lot of it from the content here but these are my personal journals the things that I'm learning the conversations I'm having about AI about longevity about the important technology transforming all of our worlds if you're interested again please join me subscribe at DM andis.com subscribe that's DM andis.com subscribe see you next week on moonshots [Music]